Ursula Le Guin - Powers

On the first morning of the siege the Senate sent a deputation to the tower above the River Gate to call out for a parley, demanding the reasons for this unprovoked and undeclared attack. The Casicaran generals refused to make any answer, allowing their soldiers to shout and jeer at the Senators. One of the Senators was Altan Arca. I saw him when he came home, dark with fury and humiliation.

The next day the Senate named one of its members, Canoe Ereco Ba-har, as Dictator, an ancient title revived in emergencies for a temporary supreme commander. New rules and ordinances immediately began to govern our lives. Strict control of food went into effect: supplies were gathered from all households into the great market warehouses and shared out with ritual punctuality and exactness; hoarders were hanged in the square before the Shrine of the Forefathers. All male citizens over twelve and under eighty years of age were conscripted into defense forces commanded by the city guard. As for slaves, when the siege began, many houses locked up all their male slaves again. The Father of Arcamand merely restricted us to the house and its grounds at night, keeping a strict curfew; and the same policy was soon ordered by the Dictator. Obviously male slaves were needed to do the work of the city, and were worse than useless if shut up like calves being fattened.

Bahar decreed that though slaves remained their masters’ property, they were also at the disposal of the City of Etra during the emergency. He and the other Senators could order work parties from any house to join the civic workforce in the city barrack. A slave ordered to a work party lived there for the duration of the job, under the command of the veteran General Hasten I was sent there for the first time in June, about two months into the siege. I was glad to go, to be of use to my city, my people. The schoolroom seemed to me shameful in its peaceable detachment from daily fears and concerns. I longed to get away from the little children and join the men. I was in high spirits, as were most of us at Arcamand and in the city as a whole. We had survived the first shock and terror and found we could live under stern conditions, on a minimum of food, among endless alarms, trapped by an enemy bent on destroying us by sword or fire or starvation. We could not only live, we could live well, in hope and comradeship.

Sallo came to see me the evening before I left for the civic barrack. She was several months pregnant, her eyes bright, her brown skin radiant, almost luminous. Though of course we had received no word of Yaven, she had made up her mind that if he came to any harm she would know it. She was certain that all was well with him. “You remember things,” she said to me, smiling, hugging me as we sat side by side on the school bench, as we had when we were children. “You remembered the start of this war, the first raid, didn’t you? You saw it. I don’t see things. But I know things. And I know I know them. Like Gammy always said: We Marsh people, we have our powers...” She laughed and rocked me sideways, bumping me with her hip.

“Oh, Sal,” I said, “did you ever think you’d like to go there, to the Marshes, to see where we came from?”

“No,” she said, laughing again. “I just want to be here, with Yaven-di home, and no siege, and lots to eat!…But you, maybe they’ll let you travel, when the siege is over, when you’re a scholar—they’ll let you go buy books, like Mimen did, he went to Pagadi, didn’t he? You can travel all over the Western Shore, you can go to the Marshes…And everybody there will have a big nose just like yours.” She stroked my nose. “Like storks. My Beaky. You’ll see!”

Sotur also came by before I left. I was tongue-tied with her. She put a small leather purse in my hand: “It might be useful. We’ll be free soon, Gavir!” she said, smiling.

The freeing of the city meant freedom to all of us in Arcamand, even if we were slaves.

I found a different mood in the civic barrack. I found a very different life there. I soon understood how childishly foolish my eagerness to go there had been. Nothing in my life in Arcamand had prepared me for the heavy work and the brutal life of a civic slave. The gang I was put in had the job of taking down an old storage building and carrying the building stones to the West Gate for use in repairs to the tower and wall. The stones were massive, weighing a half ton or so. The work required skills which nobody in the group had and tools which we had to improvise. We worked from dawn till night. We lived on the same rations we had received at Arcamand, which were adequate for that life, not for this one. Our gang boss, Cot, was a man whose only qualifications were great strength and indifference to pain. Cot’s chief, Haster’s assistant for this division of the slaves, was Hoby.

Hoby was the first person I saw when I came to the civic barrack. He had grown powerfully muscular. His head was shaven, which made his likeness to the Father and Torm less apparent. But there was the scar that split his eyebrow, and his old truculent look. I was about to speak to him when he looked at me directly, a stare of contemptuous hatred, and turned away.

He never spoke to me for the two months I lived in the civic barrack. It was he who put me on the rock gang, as we were called. He made my life hard in other ways, which he had the power to do. The other men saw that, and some mistreated me in order to curry favor with Hoby, while others did what they could to protect me from him. They asked me what “the Chief” had against me, and I answered that I didn’t know, except that he blamed me for his scar.

Haster demanded that we bank any money we had with him, for there were men in the barrack who’d kill you for a penny if they knew you had it. I hated to part with the ten bronze eagles in the leather purse, Sotur’s gift, and the only money of my own I have ever had. Has-ter was honest, by his lights, keeping a fifth of whatever he held for you, but doling out the rest in small change on demand. There was a thriving black market in food, which I’d known nothing about at Ar-camand, and I soon learned where to go to get cracked grain or dried meat to fill my empty belly, and which extortioner gave you the best value for your pennies.

My money gave out before my time was up, and the last half month on the rock gang was the worst. I don’t remember it very clearly, partly because hunger and exhaustion put me in a condition where the visions, the rememberings, came on me more and more often, so that sometimes I went from one to another, from the place of the silky blue waters to a stinking bed where I lay gazing up at a roof of dark rock just above my face, then I was standing at a window looking at a white mountain across a shining strait, and then all at once I was back straining to hoist or haul great stones in the summer heat. It was often the fiery sting of Cot’s whip on my ribs that brought me back. “Wake up, you staring fool!” he’d shout, and I’d try to understand where I was and what I should be doing, while my workmates cursed me for slacking, letting them down, sometimes putting them in danger. I learned later that Cot had asked Hoby to take me off his crew weeks before. Hoby refused. At last Cot went over his head to Haster, who said, “He’s useless, send him home.”

When I was released, it took me an hour to cross the city. I had to sit down at every corner and in every square to catch my breath and gather strength and try to push away the rememberings, the voices and strange lights and faces that filled my head. Through the branches of a forest I saw the fountain and the broad facade of Arcamand across the sunlit square. Through the darkness of a reeking cave I crossed the square, and went round to the slaves’ door, and knocked. Ennumer opened the door. “We haven’t anything to give you,” she said sharply. I couldn’t speak. She recognised me and burst into tears.